Election Day is Tuesday, and once again the choice lies before us as to whether or not to support the Fresno Chaffee Zoo with Measure Z, a sales tax that will help the zoo stay open.

In 2004, Measure Z passed and gave the zoo a life preserver. The tax is equivalent to a mere 1 cent for every $10.

It’s a minor tax that would, once again, allow the zoo to continue to operate in Fresno.

The low figure of this tax is exactly why you should vote “no” on Measure Z.

Measure Z is too easy of a tax for Fresno to approve. It will continue our approval of caging animals that aren’t meant to live in our environment.

If we’re going to enslave animals for our amusement, it should cost us more money so we are actually having to question why we should.

The term “zoo” has such inherent negativity associated with it that it’s even entered our colloquial vernacular as a negative. No one has ever called something in their life a “zoo” in a positive sense.

How would you feel if mankind weren’t the dominant species on Earth and you were shot with a tranquilizer dart and dragged across the planet, away from your home, and forced into a cage as an attraction?

You would never think to do this to a person. Not now, anyway. The most infamous chapter in American history includes enslaving other human beings.

No act could possibly compete with the deplorable nature of human slavery. We look back now and still question ourselves, generations later, and ask how we were capable of such blind superiority and violence.

Despite the gaping chasm between the two topics, is it possible that there will ever be a time in our future where we will look back at our treatment of animals?

I’m no vegetarian, but I don’t eat veal. Veal is a baby cow that has been tied down its whole life so it won’t grow muscle mass and will become a source of tender meat.

Eating animals for survival is simply representative of our position on the food chain, but the food chain doesn’t include capturing animals and making them dance for our amusement. That was never on any scientific chart I saw growing up.

I understand that animals raised in captivity have low survival odds when released into the wild, but living in a cage is no life, and people should really examine the implications to the reputation of our society when visiting zoos.

It will take several generations, but there will be, one day, enough people of this belief that we’ll abolish zoos and look back in bewilderment.

While the failure of Measure Z won’t mean the end of zoos, and it won’t even necessarily mean the end of the Fresno Chaffee Zoo, it can be the beginning of us questioning why we need zoos in the first place.

Vote “no” on Z. Cities should stop relying on wild animals to attract people and begin using creative thinking to put themselves on the map.